Lost in the mall technique
The "Lost in the Mall" technique is an experimental procedure that was used to demonstrate that confabulations can be created through suggestions made to experimental subjects. It was first developed by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus as support for the claim that it is possible to implant entirely false memories in people. The technique was developed in the context of the debate about the existence of repressed memories and false memories (see False memory syndrome.[1]
Study methodology
The idea of the lost in the mall technique was first developed and tested on a few individuals by Loftus and Ketcham.[2] It was first used in a formal study by Loftus and her student Jacqueline Pickrell in 1995.[3] In their experiment they gave 24 participants four short narratives describing childhood events, all supposedly provided by family members. The participants were told they were participating in a study looking at memory for childhood events and were instructed to try to remember as much as possible about each of the four events. If they could not remember anything about the events they were instructed to be honest and say so. Unbeknownst to the participants, one of the narratives was false. This narrative described the person being lost in a shopping mall at around the age of 5. According to the narrative the person was lost for an extended period of time before finally being rescued by an elderly person and reunited with his or her family. The narrative was based upon actual family shopping trips and incorporated plausible details provided by the relative such as the name of the mall they would usually go to when the person was a child and who would be likely to be present when they went shopping. The participants first had to fill in what they remembered about each event in a booklet, and were then called in for two interviews where they were asked about details of the events. In the study, 25% of the participants reported to be able to remember the false event. The memory for the false event was usually reported to be less clear than the true events, and people generally used more words to describe the true events than the false events. At the end of the study when the participants were told that one of the 4 events was false, some people (5 out of 24) failed to identify the lost in the mall event as the false event and instead picked one of the true events to be false. Loftus calls this study "existence proof" for the phenomenon of false memory creation and suggests that the false memory is formed as a result of the suggested event (being lost in a mall) being incorporated into already existing memories of going to the mall. With the passage of time it becomes harder for people to differentiate between what actually happened and what was imagined and they make memory errors. [4]
The lost in the mall experiment has been replicated and extended with different ages of subjects.[5]
Criticisms of methodology and conclusions
Some conclusions drawn based on the lost in the mall technique (specifically that leading questions can create false memories of child sexual abuse) have been criticized. An article in the journal Child Development by Pezdek and Hodges described an extension of the experiment. By using the subjects' family members to do the interviewing, their study was able to replicate Loftus' findings that memories of being lost in the mall could be created and were more likely to occur in young children. However, a much smaller number of children reported false memories of another untrue incident: that of a painful and embarrassing enema.[5] Another article by Kenneth Pope in the American Psychologist questioned the comparability of the technique's ability to generate a false memory with the ability of a therapist to create a pseudomemory of child rape, as well as possible confounding variables within the study.[6] In still another article (in Ethics & Behavior), Lynn Crook and Martha Dean question the application of the study to the creation of false memories during therapy and criticize the study for methodological errors.[7]
Loftus has responded to Crook and Dean's criticisms, pointing to the exaggerations, omissions and errors in the description of the technique, the general lack of scientific competence of their reply and mis-statements about the actual findings of her study, describing Crook and Dean's article as a "partisan essay".[8] Loftus also states that Crook's article follows a long series of efforts to discredit her work publicly and personally.[8][9]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Loftus EF, Coan J., Pickrell, JE. Manufacturing false memories using bits of reality. In Reder, L., ed. Implicit Memory and Metacognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, in press.
- ^ Loftus, E.F. & Ketcham, K. (1994) The Myth of Repressed Memory. NY: St. Martin's Press.
- ^ Loftus, E.F. (1995). "The formation of false memories" (pdf). Psychiatric Annals. 25: 720–725.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|coauthor=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ Loftus, E.F. (1995). "The formation of false memories" (pdf). Psychiatric Annals. 25: 720–725.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|coauthor=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ a b Pezdek, K (1999). "Planting false childhood memories: The role of event plausibility". Child Development. 70 (4): 887–895. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00064. JSTOR 1132249.
{{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help); Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - ^ Pope, K. (1996). "Memory, Abuse, and Science: Questioning Claims About the False Memory Syndrome Epidemic". American Psychologist. 51 (9): 957. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.9.957. PMID 8819364. Retrieved 2008-01-31.
Does the trauma specified in the lost-in-the-mall experiment seem comparable to the trauma forming the basis of false memory syndrome? Loftus (1993) described the implanted traumatic event in the shopping-mall experiment as follows: "Chris was convinced by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall when he was five years old" (p. 532). Does this seem, for example, a reasonable analogy for a five-year-old girl being repeatedly raped by her father?....Is it possible that the findings are an artifact of this particular design, for example, that the older family member claims to have been present when the event occurred and to have witnessed it, a claim the therapist can never make? To date, replications and extensions of this study have tended to use a similar methodology; that is, either the older family member makes the suggestions in his or her role as the experimenter's confederate, or the experimenter presents the suggestion as being the report of an older family member, thus creating a surrogate confederate.
{{cite journal}}: More than one of|pages=and|page=specified (help) - ^ Crook, L.; Dean, Martha (1999). "Lost in a Shopping Mall—A Breach of Professional Ethics". Ethics & Behavior. 9 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_3. PMID 11657487. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
An analysis of the mall study shows that beyond the external misrepresentations, internal scientific methodological errors cast doubt on the validity of the claims that have been attributed to the mall study within scholarly and legal arenas. The minimal involvement—or, in some cases, negative impact—of collegial consultation, academic supervision, and peer review throughout the evolution of the mall study are reviewed.
- ^ a b Loftus, E.F. (1999). "Lost in the Mall: Misrepresentations and Misunderstandings" (pdf). Ethics & Behaviour. 9 (1): 51–60. doi:10.1207/s15327019eb0901_4. PMID 11657488.
Readers of Ethics and Behavior have been treated to a misrepresentation of my research on planting false memories, to a misstatement of the actual empirical findings, and to a distortion of the history of the development of the idea for this line of research. The partisan essay (Crook & Dean, 1998) is disturbing not only because of its errors, exaggerations, and omissions, but because, in some instances, the quality of the argument makes one wonder whether these were innocent mistakes or a deliberate attempt to distort my work. Some of these errors can be explained by simple lack of scientific competence. But others are sufficiently bizarre that they cast doubt on the process that led to the acceptance of a manuscript written by an individual who has continually made her animosity towards me very publicly known (e.g., Boener, 1996; Neimark, 1996).
- ^ Editorial (1996). "Dispatch from the memory war". Psychology Today.
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References
- Loftus, E.F. (2003). "Make-Believe Memories" (PDF). The American Psychologist. 58 (11). American Psychologist: 867–73. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.58.11.867. PMID 14609374.
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